An Election of Hope

Disclaimer:
All the opinions expressed in this article are the opinions of Dr. Seshadri
Kumar alone and should not be construed to mean the opinions of any other
person or organization, unless explicitly stated otherwise in the article.

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The
largest democratic exercise in the world, theIndian general elections of 2014,
to elect representatives to the Lower House of Parliament, theLok Sabha, ended on May 12, 2014, after a long,
5-week process, involving 9 phases, with 66.38% out of a total of 814.5 million
voters claiming their right to a free and fair vote.

Today
the results of this election have been declared, and the verdict is in favour
of theBharatiya Janata Party(BJP)-led coalition,
theNational Democratic Alliance (NDA),
which has unseated the incumbent for the last two elections, the Congress-ledUnited Progressive Alliance (UPA),
in what appears to be a massive mandate for the NDA. Counting is still in
progress, but it appears that the BJP will have enough seats for a complete
majority in parliament on its own, and a comfortable majority along with its
allies in the NDA.

Indians
are a tired lot today, but most are happily exhausted after learning of the
results. The exhaustion is because of the length
of the polling – over 5 weeks – the intensity of the campaign, and people’s anxiety to know the results. The happiness is
because the candidate of hope won.

There
are many reasons why Mr. Modi won this elections – and against strong headwinds,
too. First, he sent out the right message
that resonated with a young India – 65% of India is younger than 35. Second, he ran a
brilliant campaign, tightly scripted to the finest detail. He knew exactly how
to pitch his message to each audience he faced. Third, he made the
campaign a Presidential campaign, which contrasted him as a credible and proven
leader as a three-time Chief Minister of Gujarat with the success and
achievements of his home state behind him against the failing and corrupt Congress
Party at the centre and its leaders, Mrs. Sonia Gandhi and her son Mr. Rahul
Gandhi.

Understanding
the Pulse of Aspirational India

Mr.
Modi’s success lay in the fact that he understood the pulse of the people of
India very well. This was a significant achievement
given that just three years ago,the Anna Hazare-led
anti-corruption movementawoke Indians from
their slumber and brought the widespread corruption present in India to the
fore as a major problem. The movement led to a political party,
theAam Aadmi Party, which tried to win votes by
making corruption the core issue of India.

But
Mr. Modi understood that, deep down, Indians were not as concerned about
corruption as they were about prosperity. With such a young
demographic, India today is highly aspirational, and wants to know how it can
get whatever it wants, do whatever it likes, go wherever it pleases. They want freedom
from the chains of poverty, illiteracy, and unemployment, and have no patience
for those who preach patience.

The
Failure of Big-Government Socialism

This
is where Mr. Modi’s chief rivals, the Congress Party, the Aam Aadmi Party, as
well as the Congress Party’s various “socialist-secular” allies and rivals,
such as theSamajwadi Party, theJanata Dal (United),theBahujan Samaj Party, and theRashtriya Janata Dal,
failed to understand the pulse of the nation. The Congress Party,
in the last 5 years, has moved very much to the left of centre, with
big-government socialist policies to eliminate poverty, hunger, and
illiteracy. What they did not realize is that
people had become wise to the failure of big government. It is well-known in
India that most of the funds invested in big government schemes are stolen by
politicians and bureaucrats, and very little trickles down to the people.

Additionally,
in the earlier days of big government in India, such as the days ofMrs. Gandhi’s1970s, the government
was the dominant employer in the country. Since theeconomic liberalization that began
in the early 1990s, that picture has changed very significantly,
with private industry being seen as the status symbol of the youth. In particular, the
booming software industry in India brought prosperity and disposable income to
a lot of young Indians, and showed other Indians that they were not doomed to a
life of misery – that they, too, could live well, given the opportunities.

Poor
people today are tired of being given handouts for their poverty. They want job
opportunities so that they too can have well-paying jobs like the software
engineers they see around them; education to ensure they can compete in a
global marketplace; and sufficient incomes from real jobs so that they can buy
their food themselves rather than rely on a government program to feed them.

Mr.
Modi took the exact opposite tack of both the Congress Party, the AAP, and most
other Indian parties, by preaching a message of hope – by telling Indians that
they could get the jobs, the homes, the education, the health care, and the
luxuries that they craved - that it was not necessary to limit those to just
the few at the top.

He
told them he could help them get those by developing Indiato become a superpower, a
“Vishwa-guru” (world-teacher)as he put it, by
pursuing policies of lean government, good governance, and transparency, they
way he had done in Gujarat, where he has presided over 13 years of a booming
economy.

With
nothing positive to sell, the UPA government ran an almost exclusively negative
campaign against Mr. Modi, focusing almostentirely on the 2002 riots in
Gujarat, Modi’s state, where more than 1000 people were killed in religious
riots in 2002. They also vigorously pursued the
judicial route to try to prove that Mr. Modi was directly responsible for the
killings, but in a legal process spanning 10 years, a Special Investigative
Team appointed by the Indian Supreme Court concluded that there was no definite
evidence to show that Mr. Modi was guilty of participation in or direction of
the riots.

With
nothing concrete against Mr. Modi, the people began to tire of the unending
investigation against Mr. Modi, and were more interested in what he had to
offer them. Young India had tasted prosperity
because of liberalization; they had also seen prosperity vanish because of bad
economics and a sharp tilt to the left by the UPA government; and so the choice
to them was clear.

The
Aam Aadmi Party, too, had nothing to sell to young India except to say that if
they elected Modi, there would be an epidemic of crony capitalism, and Ambani
and Adani and other industrialists would rake in the money. What they didn’t
understand was that young Indians were more interested in howtheycould make money, not
how to prevent others from making money.

Underestimating
the People of India

One
of the sidelights of this election has been the spate of articles by
self-styled liberals, both within India and abroad, and both within mainstream
media and independent bloggers, in lecturing and talking down to the people of
India, exhorting them not to vote for Narendra Modi, cautioning themabout the overblown dangers of a
Fascist futureif they voted for Mr. Modi. These critics and
sceptics do not realize they are insulting the intelligence and character of
the people of India, by suggesting that they have little ability to
discriminate and judge fairly, and will blindly elect a Fascist to office, by
suggesting that they will be blind if atrocities are perpetrated on minorities
in India, that India – at least the India that votes a Modi into power – is a
bunch of fanatics and savages who cannot take mature decisions on fair
treatment of minorities without heeding advice from these wiser-than-thou
intellectuals. The people of India have rejected
thoroughly the gratuitous advice of these critics and self-styled intellectuals
by electing Mr. Modi.

What
is also clear is that most of these critics have failed to both feel the true pulse
of India and failed to understand India’s frustration with corrupt socialists
who have ruined India and have severely harmed their future, and are looking
for change and a fresh, new way of looking at India’s future. For these critics,
life begins and ends with the 2002 Gujarat riots; India, however, has moved
beyond 2002, and is eager to move into a bright future as a 21stcentury superpower,
and they hope Modi will be the driver of the train that will take them there.

The
Road Ahead

The
2014 elections have decisively changed the political landscape of India. The Congress Party
has been routed thoroughly and Mr. Rahul Gandhi’s reputation has taken a
beating from which it will likely never recover. From the dynastic
point of view, the party might rally around his sisterPriyanka, for the Congress party has always been
about the Nehru-Gandhi family.

The
Left has also been decimated; however, in real terms there still is a Left
grouping in Indian politics. The Aam Aadmi Party
is the new Left party for this millennium, and the Congress, of course, has
moved so far to the left that it, too, will now qualify as a Leftist
Party. So the traditional space that has been
occupied by theCPIand theCPMwill now be occupied
by the AAP and the Congress. In addition, althoughMamata Banerjeeand theTMCare said to have
“defeated the Left,” their own policies are not too far away from that of the
party they vanquished. So a combination of the Congress, the
AAP, and the TMC will serve admirably as a replacement for the rabble-rousing
Left parties of the outgoing 15thLok Sabha.

The
BJP is in power and, if it plays its cards right, is likely to be in power for
a long time, considerably more than just one term. Mr. Modi will bear
the weight of great expectations. People expect him to
set the economy right; raise India to world-leader status (“Vishwa-guru” – his
own words); transform India into Japan with bullet trains dotting the
landscape; make Indian highways look like Singapore’s; improve agriculture by
orders of magnitude, as he has claimed to have done in Gujarat; bring 24-hour
electricity to every home in every village, town, and city; get a job for every
person in the country; provide every home in rural India with a toilet; provide
drinking water to every Indian in his or her home; and remove red tape from
India’s infamous bureaucracy, to name just a few. Some of these
expectations may be a bit too high for even Modi to achieve, but as one
businessman was quoted as saying in another article I recently read, the car is
currently stuck, and if Modi can at least get it started, put it in first gear,
that will be a great start; and if he can put it in second gear, that will be
fantastic. But people are quite impatient and will
expect to see signs that this is not business as usual within the first six
months.

Inclusive
Growth

As
important as setting the tone of his administration as one of efficiency and
prosperity is of setting a tone of what the BJP calls “sarva-dharma-sama-bhava”
– an attitude of equality towards all religions – and to which one could add –
an equal attitude towards people of any disposition. This, after all, is
the main issue on which critics have lambasted Mr. Modi and held him unfit to
hold the highest office. It is also no secret that Muslims
probably overwhelmingly voted against Mr. Modi in this election.

Narendra
Modi convinced a majority of voting Indians that true inclusive growth means a
state in which the poorest Muslim will have the same opportunities for growth
as the richest Hindu if development is the focus of the state. As he never tired of
saying, “whatever I have done in Gujarat is for six crore Gujaratis – not for
Hindus or Muslims.”

If
Mr. Modi can complete a full 5-year term with no significant measure of
discrimination against minorities of any stripe, particularly against the
Muslim minority, he will have transformed campaign slogans into reality by
proving that the true measure of secularism is not quotas and appeasement, but
offering everyone an equal shot at prosperity in a new “idea of India.”

This
election has been historic in more ways than one – and one of the most
important characteristics that distinguished this election from all those
before it in Indian political history is that this election was the first one
fought on two competing economic visions: the Congress’ vision, which envisions
opportunities in India as a fixed-size cake, and so whose prescriptions involve
redistributing the cake more equitably so that everyone can live at the same
level of misery; and the Modi vision, which envisions the cake not as a static
one, but as an ever-growing cake which will allow more and more people to
partake of its benefits as time progresses, so that prosperity is accessible to
all.

2 comments:

Interesting article with some new viewpoints. Only statement I disagree with is "Mr. Modi understood that, deep down, Indians were not as concerned about corruption as they were about prosperity." Speaking on reservations, Modi said "we will create enough opportunities that reservations will become irrelevant." The issue of corruption too, as pointed by you in a previous article is related to supply and demand and is not a secondary issue for Indians

Thanks for the comment. I am only talking in a relative sense. I am not saying that Modi is unconcerned about corruption, and I agree with what you are saying. But the key here is what is emphasized. Modi emphasized development; AAP emphasized elimination of corruption to the exclusion of everything else (except, three months before the election, they suddenly claimed that communalism was a greater evil than corruption), and there was no positive aspect to the message.

I also think that many big-ticket corruption items do not affect the common man very much. Let's say, someone bribed a government official to get a big contract over someone else. So you have rich industrialist A who bribes a minister to get a contract in favor of him rather than industrialist B. Assuming they are both competent, the person who suffers here is B, and the person who gains is the politician and A. Either way, this makes little difference to the common man. Kejriwal will rail against this thing, but it makes little difference to us. What matters to the common man is whether there are job opportunities and whether he can live a good life...and Modi told the common man that he could live well. That's why the common man voted for him.

Yes, with development corruption reduces, but Modi did not focus on the corruption part of the message. He talked about a bright future for India.